Phillis Wheatley
Introduction and Biography
In 1753, Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa, Gambia. At age eight, she was abducted and taken to Boston, Massachusetts on a slave ship, and was purchased by John Wheatly, who took her as his wife’s servant (Carretta 1). She thus adopted her master's last name “Wheatley” as was the custom. The Whitley’s educated her, and she mastered Greek, English, and Latin (Carretta 40). Later, she learned to write highly commended poetry. She possessed some intelligence and had a talent which accredited her privileges atypical of other ordinary slaves. She reveled a great interest in the Bible not only for spiritual literacy but also in anticipation that justice might prevail (Carretta 51).
In 1767,
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recognizes Phills’ poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” as an excellent literary representation for black Americans rights and particularly black women, through pondering her personal predicaments. Rich of literary and poetic devices such as metaphors, symbolism and themes, the poem leaves the reader with a lucid picture of how it feels being a slave (Lamore113). It reveals the way of living of the slaves of Wheatley’s era, a time during which black people were thought not to be human enough to conform to Christianity, leave alone enjoying the citizenship rights of an American citizen (Mani 74). Wheatly serves as a good example of people who are oppressed in the society, one who adopted whatever she thought was the best for her and utilized her talents in letting others know that they have rights to conform to any religion despite their …show more content…
The word also symbolises her skin color reflecting her life status as a slave. She feels that she lived a life full of darkness in her native land where she knew not of any God. It was until she traveled abroad and got to learn about Christianity and what it requires that she transformed from a world full of darkness to a world of light.
The theme of racism is explicated in "Some view our sable race with scornful eye." (Wheatley 435 line 5) Here she wanted to let the readers to know that not everyone was a racist, the rest of the poem asserting that she is also not in the group (Mani 76). This line was incorporated to stress the importance of every human race, black or white. Additionary, the use of “the diabolic die,” (Wheatley 435 line 4) a side of a triangle trade that places slaves at the bottom, is also a symbol of how the black slaves were treated with contempt.
The poetess reveals her prowess in implementing different stylistic devices. The rhythm of the poem is corectly structured to fit five beats in each line. Consonance and alliteration are also brought out clearly (Lamore 117). Line seven may also be interpreted as a warning to Christians who value themselves more than others. Those who deem themselves to be more God-fearing and could be ironic of their real-life circumstances.
Readers unfamiliar with Phillis Wheatley may wonder of her background and who she was in particular to be able to gain rights to be mentioned in early American literature. Wheatley was born in 1753 and was captured by Africans, and sold to an American family known as the Wheatley’s. She quickly became a member of the Wheatley family, living in the home, and being tutored on reading and writing.
Wheatley was born in West Africa around 1750, and was captured when she was 7. John Wheatley purchased Phillis for his wife, Susanna; together they taught Phillis how to read and write, and as early as 12, Phillis was writing poetry and her first poem had been published. Wheatley’s poems implicitly advocated for racial equality, while condemning slavery. Her work received some negative feedback from political figureheads, such as Thomas Jefferson. White America classified a human as having the ability to read, write, and reason; therefore, leaving no room for the uneducated Africans, seeing Africans as nonhuman. Jefferson claimed Wheatley’s work was not literature because the moment he admitted Wheatley’s work was indeed literature, he would have had to admit she was a human being. The way Phillis Wheatley handled the adversity she faced is admirable. Wheatley definitely impacted American history, and “owes her place in history to advocates of inequality” (Young 1999
Wheatley starts the poem in a very dark place when she mentions the word “benighted,” (Line 2) as if the darkness has disappeared from her life once she met mercy. Since the poem was written in the late 1700’s the reader can assume that she was in the darkness in her homeland Senegal because she as a slave. Once she was brought to America by mercy she is no longer in the dark. The word benighted is to be overtaken by darkness, so this means that the speaker was benighted when she lived in a place where they did not follow certain religious beliefs as the rest of the world. The speaker’s soul is in a dark place and when she was brought to America and found God, she was enlightened. Another example of how Wheatley references color and darkness is line six in the poem “Their colour is a diabolic die,” (Line 6) this is the only sentence in the poem that has quotation marks so the readers can assume that she quoted someone. This could also mean that she is referring to a phy...
As the poem starts out, Wheatley describes being taken from her “native shore” to “the land of errors.” Her native shore was the western coast of Africa, and she was taken to the “land of errors” which represents America. America is seen in her eyes as the land of errors because of slavery. Wheatley is acknowledging right off the bat that slavery is wrong. Wheatley then goes on and references the “Egyptian gloom” which is italicized. The italicization forces the readers to focus and reflect on “Egyptian” and it’s possible
While Wheatley was literate, her upbringing comfortable, her connections advantageous, the reason of her sole joy in being brought to America because of finding Christ, her “good nigger” persona, her freedom simply given to her, and her masters encouragement of her learning, Sojourner Truth’s life was the opposite. Truth was brave, strong, outspoken and, all in all, had to work much harder to become a memorable figure and a true influencer for her race. She dedicated a large portion of her life to the fulfillment and equality of women and African Americans, while Phillis Wheatley spent her life being a pleasant acquaintance who loved her faith and emphasized it. Although there is nothing wrong in this, Phillis Wheatley could have made herself more familiar with the problems of her own race and helped them, but she did not, and this lack of improvement for her people at the time is shown through the evidence of the absence of her name in the African American equality
On Being Brought from Africa to America, Wheatley’s short poem reads powerfully. How could one possibly breeze past such a sharply positioned argument which directly places her race front and center?
Phillis Wheatley was an African-born slave in the last quarter of the eighteenth-century in New England. She was born in West Africa and brought to America on the slave ship Phillis. She was, however, much more than chattel-she was a poet. Phillis was the first African American to have a book published. In a time when women were not expected to be able to read or write, and when teaching an African American to be literate was frowned upon, Phillis Wheatley became educated in Latin and English literature. The education of Phillis Wheatley was, for the most part, for the intent of training "a servant and would-be companion for domestic utility," in which they undoubtedly succeeded. However, they "got an intellectual adornment" who, with her knowledge of the poems of Alexander Pope, the "Puritanical whiteness of her thoughts," and ability to write poems, soon became a celebrity among Boston?s social elite (Richmond 18,19).
C. Peter Riply at el.: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emnancipation. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London, 1993, pp15-37.
Stolen from their own homeland and thrown into a sailing ship towards a country of awaiting white masters, hundreds of black folks were to expect cruel hardships and withstand torturous situations, such as rape, starvation, and working without rest or pay. Being treated as something less than a human, instead, more as a tool, was considered normal far back in the year of 1761, when the revolution for freedom had not yet taken place. Considering this, June Jordan tells the tale of the first female black poet in her article, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley.” After describing the life of a slave, Jordan explains how Phillis came to be a Wheatley. Taken in by a white ‘nice’ couple, Suzannah and John Wheatley, decided to bid for a challenge in Phillis, a young seven year old girl. Then, Jordan
DuBois presents the question “[h]ow does it feel to be a problem?”, introducing the attitude towards African-Americans upon their emancipation (DuBois 3). The idea of freedom for slaves meant equality, but “the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land […] the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people” (6). The challenge faced during this time was how to deal with the now freed slaves who once had no rights. DuBois states that African-Americans merely wish “to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly i...
The poetry of Phillis Wheatley is crafted in such a manner that she is able to create a specific aim for each poem, and achieve that aim by manipulating her position as the speaker. As a slave, she was cautious to cross any lines with her proclamations, but was able to get her point across by humbling her own position. In religious or elegiac matters, however, she seemed to consider herself to be an authority. Two of her poems, the panegyric “To MAECENAS” and the elegy “On the Death of a young Lady of Five Years of Age,” display Wheatley’s general consistency in form, but also her intelligence, versatility, and ability to adapt her position in order to achieve her goals.
As time passed, Phillis was considered more like a part of the family than a slave. Phillis received an extensive education, which was comparable to that of a wealthy white man (Mason 4). Mary, the Wheatley's daughter, was an aspiring teacher and taught the Arabic-speaking girl English and ...
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
Although this poem has lots of themes, I think “redemption” is the main theme because she is focusing on the freedom of other slaves. She uses the word “redemption” just to show how much she values religion and God. It’s like she wanted to become a prophet, someone that would use the message of God to redeem the slaves. She says “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refined, and join the angelic train” (Wheatly 405). She was trying to say her main point in this quote by using her religious knowledge, she is trying to say that slaves can also be redeemed, she referred to the black people as Cain because the whites saw them as “evil” and Cain in the bible was marked evil by God for killing his brother out of jealousy. Because she doesn’t want them to look at the blacks that way, she then tells the white people that blacks can also be redeemed, polished, saved... and they can also join the angelic train and not stay marked
12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright is a photo and text book which poetically tells the tale of African Americans from the time they were taken from Africa to the time things started to improve for them in a 149 page reflection. Using interchanging series of texts and photographs, Richard Wright encompasses the voices of 12 Million African-Americans, and tells of their sufferings, their fears, the phases through which they have gone and their hopes. In this book, most of the photos used were from the FSA: Farm Security Administration and a few others not from them. They were selected to complement and show the points of the text. The African-Americans in the photos were depicted with dignity. In their eyes, even though clearly victims, exists strengths and hopes for the future. The photos indicated that they could and did create their own culture both in the past and present. From the same photos plus the texts, it could be gathered that they have done things to improve their lives of their own despite the many odds against them. The photographs showed their lives, their suffering, and their journey for better lives, their happy moments, and the places that were of importance to them. Despite the importance of the photographs they were not as effective as the text in showing the African-American lives and how the things happening in them had affected them, more specifically their complex feelings. 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright represents the voice of African-Americans from their point of view of their long journey from Africa to America, and from there through their search for equality, the scars and prints of where they come from, their children born during these struggles, their journeys, their loss, and plight...